by Jill Lepore
Tyler and Upshur may have wanted to annex Texas in order to extend slavery into the West. But they steered clear of talking about it that way. They talked the language not of slavery but of liberty, making the argument—embraced by everyone from Jefferson to Tocqueville—that the acquisition of new territory provided economic opportunities to the poor, opportunities not available in Europe, because anyone could leave industry behind, move to the woods, build a cabin, fell trees, and plow fields.
In this new age of steam, when every metaphor, suddenly, had to do with engines, people talked about the West as a “safety valve,” releasing pent-up pressure to avoid an explosion. “The public lands are the great regulator of the relations of Labor and Capital,” said Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, “the safety valve of our industrial and social engine.” (Greeley, who, with his slumped shoulders and flat face, looked rather like a frog, was the most widely read editorial writer of his generation.) Supporters of the annexation of Texas went further, applying this metaphor to the problem of slave rebellion. “If we shall annex Texas,” a Democratic senator from South Carolina promised in 1844, “it will operate as a safety-valve to let off this superabundant slave population from among us.”7
And the debate might have gone that way, were it not for what happened on board the USS Princeton February 28. As the ship passed Mount Vernon, the crew lit the Peacemaker for its final salute. Suddenly, the gun exploded. Seven men were killed in the blast, including Upshur, along with Tyler’s secretary of the navy and a New York merchant named David Gardiner, whose twenty-four-year-old daughter, Julia, was belowdecks with the president. If Tyler had been topside, he, too, would likely have been killed. Instead, he carried a fainting Julia Gardiner in his arms off the ship and onto a rescue boat.
The death of Upshur had serious political consequences. To replace him, Tyler appointed Calhoun as his new secretary of state. And Cast-Iron Calhoun talked about Texas only with reference to slavery.
As the debate over annexation intensified, John Quincy Adams, seventy-six, his face grown haggard but his political will unbroken, warned that if Texas were annexed, the North would secede; Calhoun, as lionlike at sixty-two as he had been in his youth, warned that the South would secede if it were not. The rivalry between the two men, begun with the “corrupt bargain” of 1828, continued undiminished, even if the explosion on the Potomac set them both back on their heels.
After a brief period of mourning, Congress resumed its business. “The treaty for the annexation of Texas to this Union was this day sent into the Senate,” Quincy Adams wrote in his diary in April, “and with it went the freedom of the human race.”8 Henry Clay called it “Mr. Tyler’s abominable treaty.”9 Quincy Adams insisted that annexing Texas would turn the Constitution into a “menstruous rag.”10
In June, the Senate failed to ratify the treaty by a vote of 35 to 16 that fell along sectional lines. Days later, when President Tyler married Julia Gardiner, white flowers wreathed in her hair, the New York Herald said of the wedding: “The President has concluded a treaty of immediate annexation, which will be ratified without the aid of the Senate of the United States.”11
Tyler, a better bridegroom than a president, decided to run for reelection even though no party would have him. He therefore more or less invented a third party—a one-man party—and called for a convention to nominate him under the banner of “Tyler and Texas.” He did not name a running mate; Texas was his running mate.
President Tyler officiates at a wedding between the Texas star and America in a political cartoon from a New Orleans newspaper in 1844—the year Tyler himself married. Tyler’s hope, in running, was to convince the Democrats to nominate him at their own convention. But Andrew Jackson, edging toward eighty in a not altogether quiet retirement at his slave plantation, had changed his mind about annexation. Earlier, he’d opposed it, fearing a war with Mexico. Now he favored it. But Van Buren did not. Jackson, still controlling the party, decided to thwart Van Buren’s attempt to win the Democratic nomination. Jackson called a meeting at the Hermitage. “General Jackson says the candidate for the first office should be an annexation man, and from the Southwest,” wrote James K. Polk, a Jackson loyalist. Polk became that man.12
Polk was forty-eight and wiry and had eyes like caverns and hair like smoke. A former Speaker of the House and governor of Tennessee, he was unknown outside his home state. “Who is James K. Polk?” became the motto of his opposition. Tyler, assured that the Democrats would fight for annexation, dropped out of the race.13
Henry Clay had been trying to become president of the United States since he was a boy in short pants in the hills of Virginia. He’d already run three times, but in 1844, when he was sixty-seven, the Whigs chose him once more. Clay opposed annexation, but not strenuously enough for abolitionists who left the Whigs to join the Liberty Party. The National Convention of Colored Men—men who hoped, one day, to be able to vote—endorsed the Liberty Party, too.
The race between Polk and Clay, a referendum on annexation, was extraordinarily close. In the end, Polk won the popular vote by a razor-thin margin of 38,000 votes out of 2.6 million cast. Tyler, limping to the end of his term, took Polk’s victory as a mandate for annexation and pressed the House for a vote. On January 25, 1845, the House passed a resolution in favor of annexation, 120–98, having devised a compromise under which the eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion. On February 28, the one-year anniversary of the disaster on the USS Princeton, the Senate approved that resolution by just two votes. It would fall to Polk to sign the formal treaty, but it was Tyler who signed the resolution, on March 1, three days before Polk took office. In a slight to his cast-iron secretary of state, he handed the pen he used to sign it not to Calhoun but to his new bride, Julia Gardiner, as if Texas were her wedding gift.
Two days later, General Almonté, with epaulets like wings, was recalled to Mexico. Both nations braced for war. American soldiers pointed their guns to the southwest, ready to fire shots across a border. But soon enough the United States would be at war with itself, a nation looking down the barrel of its own gun.
I.
IN THE 1840S AND 1850S, the United States faced a constitutional crisis that recast the parties and deepened the national divide. Expansion, even more than abolition, pressed upon the public the question of the constitutionality of slavery. How or even whether this crisis would be resolved was difficult to see not only because of the nature of the dispute but also because there existed very little agreement about who might resolve it: Who was to decide whether a federal law was unconstitutional?
One man of unbounded temerity had said that the Supreme Court could decide. In 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall had asserted that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marshall may have established a precedent for judicial review, but he had hardly made it a practice. Before his death, in 1835, at the age of seventy-nine, he served on the court for thirty-four years; Marbury is the only time the Marshall Court overturned a federal law.
Another man of similar disposition had said that the states had this authority. When, in 1832, Calhoun, on behalf of South Carolina, had argued that the states can simply nullify acts of Congress, his argument had failed, and making it had nearly destroyed his career.
A third man, not to be undone in the matter of audacity, insisted that this power lay with the president alone. When Jackson vetoed the Bank Act, he had demonstrated that the president has the power to block legislation, but while Jackson sorely wished he had the authority to pronounce laws unconstitutional, this was the merest fancy.
In the midst of all this clamoring among the thundering white-haired patriarchs of American politics, there emerged the idea that the authority to interpret the Constitution rests with the people themselves. Or, at least, this became a rather fashionable thing to say. “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the pe
ople’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” Daniel Webster roared from the floor of Congress.14 Every man could read and understand the Constitution, Webster insisted. As to the actual state of affairs, there was considerable disagreement. In 1834, Justice Joseph Story published a schoolbook in which he attempted to illustrate the nation’s laws to its children. “The Constitution is the will, the deliberate will, of the people,” he explained.15 Tocqueville rhapsodized that the American people knew their Constitution as if by heart. “I scarcely ever met with a plain American citizen who could not distinguish with surprising facility the obligations created by the laws of Congress from those created by the laws of his own state,” the Frenchman reported.16 He thought that the American people were fitted to their Constitution like a hand to a glove. But William Grimes, who escaped from slavery in Virginia 1814 and became a barber in Connecticut—and who was the sort of person Tocqueville never interviewed—had a different idea about just how fitted were the people and the parchment: “If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave,” Grimes wrote, “I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious happy and free America.”17 Americans’ deepest and most abiding divide turned on this starkly different reading of their Constitution, in what meaning lay between the ink written onto parchment and the scars etched on a black man’s back.
A great many people on both sides of this divide had hoped that the long-awaited publication of James Madison’s Notes on the debates at the constitutional convention would cast so much light on the question of slavery as to resolve it. Madison had been asked, time and again, to resolve disputes by revealing their contents. But he refused, steadfast in keeping his vow of secrecy. For years, for decades, Madison had added to and revised his record of what was said and done in the Pennsylvania State House in the long, hot summer of 1787. He’d puttered away at it. The Constitution couldn’t be rewritten or easily amended—but Madison’s Notes could. As the years passed, and Madison grew old, he observed how many other nations had followed the United States’ lead and written their own constitutions: France, Haiti, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland. By 1820, at least sixty constitutions had been written in Europe alone; eighty more would be written by 1850. Very few of those constitutions lasted.18
In 1836, Madison turned eighty-five and collapsed at the breakfast table. “The Sage of Montpelier Is No More!” announced the Charleston Courier, in a column blocked in black.19 He was the last delegate to the constitutional convention to die. Madison’s will, made public that summer, revealed two facts that agitated each side in the debate over slavery: he had not freed his slaves, and he had arranged for a sizable part of the proceeds of the publication of his Notes to go the American Colonization Society. The next year, the fifty-year reign of secrecy came to a close. But so nervous were members of Congress about what the Notes might contain, and how their publication would turn the political winds, that when Dolley Madison asked Congress to pay for the printing, the panicked House could hardly manage to hold a vote.20
In the end, Congress approved the expense, and the Notes were finally printed in 1840. Far from settling the issue of whether the Constitution did or did not sanction slavery, publication gave partisans on all sides more ammunition for their arguments. Radical abolitionists, finding in the Notes evidence of coldhearted deal making in Philadelphia, came to consider the Constitution unredeemable. William Lloyd Garrison, peering out from narrow spectacles, would infamously call the Constitution “a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell.” But other opponents of slavery quoted from Madison’s Notes to argue that the Constitution most specifically did not sanction slavery. In The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, Massachusetts lawyer Lysander Spooner damned Garrison for damning the Constitution and wondered why abolitionists were so scared of using it as a weapon: “If they have the constitution in their hands, why, in heaven’s name do they not out with it, and use it?”21
The Notes, it appeared, could be read as variously as the Constitution itself. As one shrewd observer remarked, “The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible.” And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it. Remarked New York governor Silas Wright, “No one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity . . . to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient.”22
And so it came to pass that in 1846, when the United States faced war with Mexico, Americans had yet to settle some seemingly elemental matters relating to their system of government. Annexing Texas meant trying to stretch the already taut parchment of the Constitution across still vaster distances. And the possibility of annexing conquered parts of Mexico meant something else, too—not merely extending the Republic but founding an empire.
A NATION HAS borders but the edges of an empire are frayed.23 While abolitionists damned the annexation of Texas as an extension of the slave power, more critics called it an act of imperialism, inconsistent with a republican form of government. “We have a republic, gentlemen, of vast extent and unequalled natural advantages,” Daniel Webster pointed out. “Instead of aiming to enlarge its boundaries, let us seek, rather, to strengthen its union.”24 Webster lost that argument, and, in the end, it was the American reach for empire that, by sundering the Union, brought about the collapse of slavery.
No American president made that reach for empire with more bluster and determination than James K. Polk. Texas was only the beginning. Polk wanted to acquire Florida, too, and, he hoped, Cuba. (“As the pear, when ripe, falls by the law of gravity into the lap of the husbandman,” Calhoun had once said, “so will Cuba eventually drop into the lap of the Union.”)25 But when Polk sent an agent to Spain, he was told that, rather than sell Cuba to the United States, Spain “would prefer seeing it sunk in the Ocean.”26
More immediately, Polk wanted to acquire Oregon, an expanse of achingly beautiful land that included all of what later became Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, and much of what later became Montana and Wyoming. “Our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable,” Polk announced, as if willing this to be true. Britain, Russia, Spain, and Mexico had all made claims to the Oregon Territory. Americans, though, had been staking their claim by moving there. They’d been heading west from Missouri along the arduous Oregon Trail, a series of old Indian roads that cut across mountains and unfurled over valleys and snaked along streams. In 1843, some eight hundred Americans traveled the Oregon Trail, carrying their children in their arms and pulling everything they owned in wind-swept wagons. With Polk’s pledge behind them, hundreds became thousands. They traveled in caravans, guided by little more than books like Lansford W. Hastings’s Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California and John C. Frémont’s Report of an Exploration . . . between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains (1843) or his Report of the Exploring Expedition to Oregon and California (1845). Frémont, born in Georgia in 1813, had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. During a series of extraordinary expeditions, he mapped much of the West. How much of this territory did Americans want? The answer became a rallying cry: “The Whole of Oregon!”27
To the southwest, Polk had no intention of ending his reach with the annexation of Texas. Nor did John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review. “Texas is now ours,” O’Sullivan wrote in 1845, and California would soon be, too: “it will be idle of Mexico to dream of dominion.”28 Immediately after Mexico severed diplomatic relations with the United States, Polk sent an envoy to Mexico with $25 mill
ion in hopes of buying three stretches of land: the Nueces Strip, a patch of disputed territory claimed by both Texas and Mexico; New Mexico; and Alta California, north of Baja California and including parts of what became Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. When Mexico refused to treat with the Polk delegation, Polk ordered U.S. troops into the Nueces Strip; they set up camp along the Rio Grande. To lead them, Polk passed over more experienced generals in favor of Zachary Taylor, a fellow southerner unlikely to question his questionable orders.
Polk hoped to provoke a confrontation and soon got what he was after. During a skirmish on April 25, 1846, Mexican forces killed eleven U.S. soldiers. Polk asked Congress to declare war. “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil,” he insisted.29 Not everyone was convinced that Mexico had fired first, or that the Americans who were killed had been standing on American soil when they were shot. In Congress, a gangly young House member from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln introduced resolutions, the so-called spot resolutions, demanding to know the exact spot where American blood was first shed on American soil. He earned the nickname Spotty Lincoln. He did not prevail.
Congress granted Polk his declaration, and war came, but opposition escalated, not least because troubling news from Mexico traveled to American cities in record-breaking time. At the outbreak of the war, the publisher of the New York Sun established an ad hoc news-gathering network involving boats and stagecoaches and early telegraph operators. The Sun’s scheme came to be called “the wire service” and, later, the Associated Press.30
Polk’s very slender victory at the polls proved a thin reed on which to wage a war of aggression in the name of the American people. Nor did Congress escape heightened scrutiny. In the quarrelsome 1840s, visitors to Congress very often found its deliberations contemptible, but no one was more severe on this subject than the author of Pickwick Papers. During his stay in Washington, Charles Dickens, who had started out as a police reporter, visited the House and Senate every day, sitting in the galleries, taking notes. He found the rooms in the Capitol attractive and well appointed—“both houses are handsomely carpeted,” he allowed—and the Senate was “dignified and decorous,” its deliberations “conducted with much gravity and order.” But meetings of the House of Representatives, he said, were “the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.” Its members were cowardly, petty, cussed, and degraded. Dickens, for all the flair of his pen, had by no means exaggerated. Although hardly ever reported in the press, the years between 1830 and 1860 saw more than one hundred incidents of violence between congressmen, from melees in the aisles to mass brawls on the floor, from fistfights and duels to street fights. “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs,” Dickens wrote, “to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.” Dickens knew a rogue when he heard one and a circus when he saw one.31